Our Harvard: Reflections on College Life by Twenty-two Distinguished Graduates

Twenty-two notable Harvard graduates, ranging from the class of 1917 to that of 1981, reminisce about their undergraduate years in essays that record everything from high-spirited pranks to thoughts on influential teachers to the often devastating intrusion of world events into the college years. Buckminster Fuller recalls that his class of 1917 attended a comfortable, insulated Harvard—but also that one in ten was destined to die in the first World War. Anton Myrer remembers the hectic months before this country entered World War Two when everything— “classes, courses, meals, drinks, dates, love affairs”—suddenly accelerated. James Fallows writes about the impassioned politics of the Sixties, when the campus itself became a scene of violent confrontation. But the world did not always intrude. Robert Fitzgerald sat up until the small hours, cultivating early poems in an ‘‘inky chaos.” Robert Coles writes movingly of revelations grasped under Perry Miller’s guidance; Peter Prescott and John Spooner describe some of the more hilarious excesses that characterized the “Silent Generation” of the Fifties; John Finley writes a loving and comprehensive history of the place that has been home to him for over fiftv years